Void of Silence
by thelionheartedgirl
Summary: STEAM POWERED GIRAFFE. He used to love the world and everything in it. Now he couldn't think of anything he despised more. (Jon centric, character death)


Jon watched as a broken pane of glass finally broke free of its battered frame, tumbling to the floor beside him with a deafening crash. He barely felt the ricocheting shards of glass scratch deep gouges into his once golden faceplates. He trudged onwards along the empty street, to where exactly he didn't quite know. All he knew was that he had to get away from _here_.

Forty years without mankind had done a great deal to the landscape. Where grass once grew, lush and green and teeming with life, there was only dirt and cracked earth. Not even birds flew overhead anymore. He couldn't remember the last time it had rained.

He grimaced as his left shoulder gave out with a grinding screech, inner mechanisms failing through lack of maintenance. He knew that it wouldn't be long before his other limbs followed suit, feeling the stiffness in his joints as they slowly rusted and corroded. It should have been painful, but he found that he'd stopped feeling pain long ago. He knew he should be alarmed by that fact, but he felt nothing. Not anymore.

He felt his Koi flip nauseatingly in his chest as his thoughts strayed to his brothers, his friends, the people he had lost. He shook his head jerkily to shake them away. He didn't want to dwell on those kinds of thoughts. It was far too late to do anything for them now, so what good did thinking about them do?

Truth be told, he didn't know why he even kept moving at all. He may as well have just found a comfortable spot in what was left of the Walter Mansion and waited for the end; for his boiler to run dry and his Koi to fall still for the last time.

But he hadn't.

For whatever reason, he had felt compelled to leave the Mansion far behind him, just walking endlessly. At least it was a more interesting way to die, he thought, than sitting unmoving in the Mansion for years, gathering dust.

The repetitive motion of putting one dirt covered, red converse clad foot in front of the other helped to keep the distressing thoughts and memories from taking over.

He stumbled suddenly as his foot caught on a fragment of bone sticking up from out of the dirt, putting his one good arm out to steady himself on the roof of a nearby car.

His routine broken, he felt the unwanted thoughts flood back to the forefront of his mind. He let out a keening wail of pain and dropped to his knees in the dirt, sobbing quietly.

Oh God, they were all dead. His whole family, everyone who had ever mattered to him, gone. He'd never even gotten to say goodbye.

He clutched his chest as his Koi thrashed about in distress, oily tears making dark tracks down his face plates. There was no fight in him anymore. What little will to live he'd had before had evaporated the moment he'd stopped moving forwards. He didn't have the strength to get up, to keep walking on endlessly. He just couldn't bring himself to anymore.

What had once been so easy for him now seemed like an impossible task and he allowed himself to break down completely. Body wracked with heaving sobs, he felt his other arm shut down with a sickening crunch. There really was no point in going on any longer, not now that he had no arms to catch himself with the next time he fell.

He collapsed to the floor and flopped over onto his back, turning his gaze to the dark skies above him. There were no stars, those had long since disappeared. The world was a cold, cold place now, he thought to himself sadly.

He'd used to look at the world in wonder, see the beauty in everything and anything, as a small child would. Those days were long gone.

He hated the world, now.

He hated the silence, the absolute lack of sound that had slowly driven him insane.

He hated the darkness, each day becoming harder and harder to see as his optical receptors began to flicker and dim like a dying flame.

Most of all though, he hated the loneliness. Before, he had managed to find companionship in any place, be it in the form of his brothers or even the tiniest insect. Now, there was nothing.

No life. No sound. No light.

It was awful.

And he knew it would never get better. There would be no coming back from this. This was the end, and Goddamnit he wasn't ready for it. He doubted he ever would have been.

He let a grim smile slip onto his face as he lay there, spread eagled in the middle of the street, gazing up into the empty void of space above him. And as his receptors flickered out for the last time, all he could think about was the people he had loved, the people he had lost. The people he would finally be reunited with after all this time.

And just like that, the last living soul on earth disappeared forever.


End file.
